Representatives of the Embassy of Japan
MECs and Provincial Heads of Education
Education officials from provincial library services
Colleagues in the teaching fraternity and Librarians
Distinguished guests,
I am delighted to be with you today. Our department is heartened by Japan’s generous support for education in South Africa. Your country has shown leadership in championing the cause of Africa’s renewal and development.
Indeed we’re very grateful to receive valuable resources – mobile libraries – that will help us greatly to improve levels of literacy in our country. Raising the level of literacy and numeracy is a critical area we have identified as a priority.
Studies have pointed to the need for us to improve in this area, including the recent Southern and Eastern African Consortium for Monitoring Education Quality (SACMEQ) III Report.
Our vision is of a South Africa in which all people have access to lifelong quality education, which will in turn contribute towards improving the quality of life and in building a peaceful, prosperous and democratic society. This way we can advance the vision of creating a better Africa and a better world.
Our department is holding firm to the mission of providing leadership in the building of a South African education system for the 21st century. The realisation of that dream must begin in the classroom with learners who can read, write and calculate, with adequate resources, including learning materials.
Accordingly, your assistance goes directly to the heart of our priorities. Many of our learners, particularly those from historically disadvantaged communities, are in schooling environments without well-resourced libraries.
Mobile libraries will certainly strengthen support and ensure that the gains made in education since we attained democracy in 1994 are sustained.
Since the advent of democracy, we’ve grappled with inherited backlogs in schools pertaining to the provision of quality reading resources.
Given the enormity of addressing these backlogs and financial implications thereof, we’ve had to opt for an incremental approach to the provisioning of library resources.
The strength of this approach lies in its developmental nature which allows for different models of library resources, mobile libraries being one of them.
These mobile libraries will indeed make a huge impact in raising the value of reading and books. We trust that our schools will make good use of this valuable resource.
Your partnership means a lot to us. Research has shown that learners with access to library and reading resources demonstrate higher achievement, improved literacy and greater chances of success.
The mobile library model will ensure books are ferried to schools thereby assisting in expanding access to meet educational needs of our learners and their teachers.
Today more than ever, libraries are extremely important for the preservation of our cultural heritage. No path resonating with the philistinism that saw the burning of books in the Dark Ages will give us a united, democratic, non-racial, non-sexist and prosperous African state.
It is in this context that we welcome this gesture. You’ve enriched our work aimed at undoing the debilitating legacy of apartheid with its triple crisis of poverty, unemployment and widening inequalities.
For indeed without these resources, there can be no quality in education. And without quality, we will find it extremely difficult to achieve our reconstruction and development goals.
We’re committed to strategic partnerships with all our partners and stakeholders who share a common vision of a literate society and world. This partnership will provide support for attaining an improved reading culture and better communities.
We firmly believe that together, with all the support structures at our disposal, we will succeed in transforming education in line with the dictates of a developmental society like ours, seeking rapidly to achieve economic growth and development simultaneously with job-creation for the people.
Japan has ‘walked this walk’ of development and growth before, and has excelled in areas we still aspire to reach. Therefore our relations are very valuable for us.
Your investment in the education of our children serves to advance our country’s recently adopted New Growth Path (2010) and will indeed help us reach educational standards envisaged in South Africa’s new National Development Plan.
Clearly, the best gift to the learners of South Africa would be high-quality education. Accordingly, we thank Japan for the decision to join forces with us around library provisioning.
We welcome efforts that provincial heads of libraries will take in their respective provinces to see to it that the resources are effectively utilised. This is the best way for us to say ‘thank you’. I would also like to wish all the best to the five provinces that have received the buses in 2011. This is an opportunity of a lifetime that must never be squandered.
Lastly, since the initiation of the Tokyo International Conference on African Development (TICAD) process in 1993, Japan has championed steadfastly the cause of African development. Your country was also represented at the inaugural ceremony of President Jacob Zuma, in 2009.
And to our appreciation, Japan has identified with our efforts for Africa’s renewal. We greatly value our relations of which the mobile libraries are a product. It is for these reasons that we thank you from the bottom of our hearts.
Address at handover of mobile library buses by Mrs Angie Motshekga, Minister of Basic Education, Sol Plaatje
